Big Brakes for CHEAP!

[CulRidr]

So the EDM brake conversion is just an upgrade for the non MSPs...That makes more sense.

Now if you could just up with a cheaper stock big brake option for the rear like the ms6 fronts we're in good shape

No kidding...the MSP ones are so bloody expensive in comparison with the fronts (which I've upgraded to).

 

[FlyinHawaiian]

I'm just trying to reason through this here, but it seems to me that when upgrading just the fronts...

if you have ABS, your ABS intervention point would be the same, so at low speeds when you would have been able to have ABS intervening on the stock brakes, it would do so at the same point with the upgraded brakes, HOWEVER, at higher speeds when you are not on the lock-up limit, you would be able to extract more braking power from the fronts, which is obviously where it is more necessary. I don't see how this would lead to more understeering, except i suppose if you're hard on the brakes and trying to turn in, the car will be less likely to change direction. If you're braking in a straight line, then turning, i would think it would definitely be advantageous.

Anyone care to refute/correct me?? I'm not basing this statement on research or anything, just thinking about the issue, so i may very well be wrong.

Here's the problem. In racing, clamping power is nothing compared to longevity and heat resistance. If we're honest, the brakes on the MSP are MORE than adequate when it comes to clamping power. Its not hard to lock them up at high speeds if you stomp on them. Larger calipers only means you'll just be able to lock them up with less foot power. On the other hand, the larger pad and rotor mean that there's more surface area to dissipate heat. If you want better ONE TIME stopping performance, I suggest the following modifications:

Soft brake pads
Slotted rotors
Ultra High Performance Tires

The first two mods allow the pads and rotors to work together immediately. The slotted rotors bite into the pads, which as soft as they are, dig into the metal of the rotors. Now, with normal street tires, the braking force will overcome the coefficient of friction that the tire contact patch has on the road, and the result is a lockup. Honestly, the NUMBER ONE way to increase braking performance is to either increase your contact patch, or increase the stickiness of the rubber.

The downside to the above mods are that the softer pads don't last long to begin with and also dust A LOT, while the slotted rotors eat pads for breakfast. The tires also usually have a short shelf life too, but at least you can get other performance gains besides braking from them.

Now we get to the issue of brake balance. The brake booster in our cars is designed to provide a certain ammount of fluid to each caliper to provide the exact amount of brake pressure to the front and rears. If my memory serves me correctly, its typically a 70/30 F/R balance. By throwing big brakes up front only, you can potentially throw this balance off, and thus negatively affect the handling of the car. Mazda spent hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars developing the right brakes for the car... Do you think you know better than them?

Honestly, if you want the best out of your brakes, get some nice ceramic pads, slotted rotors and some sticky tires.

If nothing else, this is a cosmetic upgrade...

 

[CulRidr]

^Here's a question; how much more fluid does a bigger caliper take? If the amount is the same (no idea?), then by what you said, the brake pressure remains the same; the only difference is how strong the brakes are in the front, which would still affect handling, but not necessarily in a bad way if you know what to expect and how to control it...

 

[Wagonbacker9]

i believe the benefit here is more for those who want more braking power due to both increased power output, AND increased traction. I can lock up my stock size all season tires... but I believe I would have a lot more trouble if I had upsized sticky summer tires... getting closer to that threshold would be beneficial, especially for someone tracking their car.

 

[43975]

Mazda spent hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars developing the right brakes for the car... Do you think you know better than them?

Are we talking about the same Mazda that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing the rear clunk, non-forged fsde but boosted it anyway, weak failure prone LSD, and no boost gauge in a turbo car that has a failure prone WGA???
I think we have all come the conclusion early on that most things on the MSP either need to be upgraded or "dealt with" I've been happy with my brakes but an upgrade is always a nice thing.

 

[CulRidr]

^especially since the front brakes on the MSP are directly taken from the 626 V6....speaking of which, would the rear brakes of a V6 626 fit on a Proteg, and are they bigger then a non-MSP?

 

[avarela86]

i believe the benefit here is more for those who want more braking power due to both increased power output, AND increased traction.

I got mine only cause I ran nice pads and rotors on ES setup for some time and I realized that I STILL needed brakes. Now at higher boost I think it's a requirement. The whole explanation above seems correct when you are limited by classes in autox but if the car is to be on a road course without brake restrictions(which is unlikely) I rather have brake pressure and clamping force to spare than to need some.

 

[Wagonbacker9]

^especially since the front brakes on the MSP are directly taken from the 626 V6....speaking of which, would the rear brakes of a V6 626 fit on a Proteg, and are they bigger then a non-MSP?

its been said before, it'll likely be said again.. almost pointless from a functional standpoint to upgrade the rear brakes.

 

[TheMAN]

I'm just trying to reason through this here, but it seems to me that when upgrading just the fronts...

if you have ABS, your ABS intervention point would be the same, so at low speeds when you would have been able to have ABS intervening on the stock brakes, it would do so at the same point with the upgraded brakes, HOWEVER, at higher speeds when you are not on the lock-up limit, you would be able to extract more braking power from the fronts, which is obviously where it is more necessary. I don't see how this would lead to more understeering, except i suppose if you're hard on the brakes and trying to turn in, the car will be less likely to change direction. If you're braking in a straight line, then turning, i would think it would definitely be advantageous.

Anyone care to refute/correct me?? I'm not basing this statement on research or anything, just thinking about the issue, so i may very well be wrong.

your wheel locks up when your tire loses traction and the wheel stops turning... that's why its called "lock up"

the ABS system monitors the wheel speed and when senses lockup or close to it, activates

 

[TheMAN]

Here's the problem. In racing, clamping power is nothing compared to longevity and heat resistance. If we're honest, the brakes on the MSP are MORE than adequate when it comes to clamping power. Its not hard to lock them up at high speeds if you stomp on them. Larger calipers only means you'll just be able to lock them up with less foot power. On the other hand, the larger pad and rotor mean that there's more surface area to dissipate heat. If you want better ONE TIME stopping performance, I suggest the following modifications:

Soft brake pads
Slotted rotors
Ultra High Performance Tires

The first two mods allow the pads and rotors to work together immediately. The slotted rotors bite into the pads, which as soft as they are, dig into the metal of the rotors. Now, with normal street tires, the braking force will overcome the coefficient of friction that the tire contact patch has on the road, and the result is a lockup. Honestly, the NUMBER ONE way to increase braking performance is to either increase your contact patch, or increase the stickiness of the rubber.

The downside to the above mods are that the softer pads don't last long to begin with and also dust A LOT, while the slotted rotors eat pads for breakfast. The tires also usually have a short shelf life too, but at least you can get other performance gains besides braking from them.

Now we get to the issue of brake balance. The brake booster in our cars is designed to provide a certain ammount of fluid to each caliper to provide the exact amount of brake pressure to the front and rears. If my memory serves me correctly, its typically a 70/30 F/R balance. By throwing big brakes up front only, you can potentially throw this balance off, and thus negatively affect the handling of the car. Mazda spent hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars developing the right brakes for the car... Do you think you know better than them?

Honestly, if you want the best out of your brakes, get some nice ceramic pads, slotted rotors and some sticky tires.

If nothing else, this is a cosmetic upgrade...

I hope you mean MASTER CYLINDER and not brake booster as that's just a power brake unit!

you're also forgetting that soft pads fades hell of a lot faster than harder pads... this is why choosing the RIGHT brake pads is VERY important... with stock EDM brake pads, they stop marginally (but not scary) on streets.... but on the highway when I mash the pedal, they heat up and that's when they really work good! the coefficient of friction has been shifted to a higher temperature range... this is a performance pad, more so than the MSP's stock pads which are not EU certified

OTOH, lots of people are happy as hell over EBC greens because they have a good initial bite, work better at a lower temperature range... they don't ever work their brakes hard to see that these pads fade faster once it sees track abuse... it takes a lot to get a stock pad to fade... ask mike kojima, when he raced his SE-R, he had some trick "racing" pads and they wore all out while doing qualifying or some s***... regardless of what he was doing, he was ****** during that weekend and the only place open was a local nissan dealer.... so he picked up STOCK NX2000 pads popped them into his SE-R and the pads NEVER faded that whole weekend and worked pretty ******* good!

 

[TheMAN]

Are we talking about the same Mazda that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing the rear clunk, non-forged fsde but boosted it anyway, weak failure prone LSD, and no boost gauge in a turbo car that has a failure prone WGA???
I think we have all come the conclusion early on that most things on the MSP either need to be upgraded or "dealt with" I've been happy with my brakes but an upgrade is always a nice thing.

mazda didn't put any special brakes on the MSP... it's parts binned off the EDM 626 diesel wagon and the EDM P5 parts binned off that 626... the 626 was an important car in europe... a hot seller like the 323 was... because of how important it was, they spent as much R&D time/money they could (during the pits of mazda's troubles) on the 626 before the last generation came out in 97 over there... likewise, they spent a lot of time/money on the 3rd gen protege before it came out too... that's why proteges are such solid cars and so are the non-US last gen 626s (which shares the chassis and suspension as the protege)... US 626s are quite a bit different and half of the damn car is ford

like I said... the EDM brakes are the same as the MSP s***... the only real difference is, there's a lot more of those in this world, they're not painted silver, so that means its CHEAPER

 

[FlyinHawaiian]

I hope you mean MASTER CYLINDER and not brake booster as that's just a power brake unit!

you're also forgetting that soft pads fades hell of a lot faster than harder pads... this is why choosing the RIGHT brake pads is VERY important... with stock EDM brake pads, they stop marginally (but not scary) on streets.... but on the highway when I mash the pedal, they heat up and that's when they really work good! the coefficient of friction has been shifted to a higher temperature range... this is a performance pad, more so than the MSP's stock pads which are not EU certified

OTOH, lots of people are happy as hell over EBC greens because they have a good initial bite, work better at a lower temperature range... they don't ever work their brakes hard to see that these pads fade faster once it sees track abuse... it takes a lot to get a stock pad to fade... ask mike kojima, when he raced his SE-R, he had some trick "racing" pads and they wore all out while doing qualifying or some s***... regardless of what he was doing, he was ****** during that weekend and the only place open was a local nissan dealer.... so he picked up STOCK NX2000 pads popped them into his SE-R and the pads NEVER faded that whole weekend and worked pretty ******* good!

Yeah, sorry.. I meant master cylinder. The reason I said a soft pad was for ONE stop braking performance. They come up to temp really quickly and are good for that inital stop. You are absolutely correct though, for track use, a harder (such as ceramic) pad works best. Takes longer to come up to temp, but will last for the duration of your run/event.

We're on the same page in the fact that BBK's rarely offer better braking performance over stock brakes. I didn't even get into the fact that the larger rotors increase your rotational mass and will actually make you stop longer than the smaller ones...

 

[TheMAN]

but brake torque also is increased because of larger pad, larger caliper pistons and stuff... those should also be considered

one thing is for sure though, unsprung weight will have increased and handling my suffer due to it

 

[CulRidr]

^That's what lighter rims are for

 

[TheMAN]

not when stock brakes and stock rims is still lighter than BBK + light rims

 

[CulRidr]

^agreed. I wish I weighed my MSP front brake upgrade in comparison with my stock brakes to find out how much heavier they were because those calipers were HEAVY!
The increase in braking power (from the large increase in pad surface+better pad material) was worth any increase in unsprung weight though!

 

[jmv]

hmmm... i really don't know what i want to do with the brakes anymore. I wish there were more race-derived (and race proven) setups for our cars. Does anyone know what tripoint ran as far as brakes when they were racing proteges??

 

[iluvmacs]

any successful installs??? pics??

 

[sean22306]

Was at Jason's yesterday and saw them on the mx6 and Ross's probe. They're amazing I know exactly what I'm doing when I need new brakes. I'll vouch for this.

 

[Wagonbacker9]

only reason I may not is to stay out of street mod class for autoX.